The Hollywood Liberal

Bush’s Wax Head Suffers $25,000 In Damages After Las Vegas Attack

Huffington Post

Makeup artist fixes perfect wax image of
the clueless Monkey.
Excerpt:
President Bush’s wax likeness is taking a thumpin’ these days at Madame Tussaud’s celebrity waxworks in Las Vegas.
Bush’s head suffered about $25,000 in damages when a Madame Tussaud’s visitor attacked it the day before last week’s elections.
“No one’s pushed one over before,” said Jack Taylor, spokesman for the tourist attraction.

H.L.s Take:
Bush is taking a thumping everywhere these days… and rightly so. Lets hope the Democrats stop acting like Bush is their god, and start thumping all of his policies.

Bush approval drops, Democrats’ goals backed: poll

Reuters
Excerpt:
The strongest support, 92 percent, was for lowering drug prices for retirees on Medicare by allowing the government to negotiate directly with drug companies. Some three-quarters of respondents said it should be a top priority, according to Newsweek.
Americans also supported raising the federal minimum wage (89 percent), investigating government contracts in Iraq (89 percent) and cutting the interest rate of federal student loans (88 percent).
Bush’s 31-percent job approval rating, down from 35 percent a week earlier, was a new low in Newsweek’s polling

H.L.s Take:
The majority of Americans never stopped caring about these things, it’s just that 3 consecutive elections were stolen by republicans who fooled them into thinking that they were in the minority. Now that everyone knows the truth, its time for politicians to start acting accordingly. Raising minimum wage, and lowering perscription drug prices, are a start. Helping the poor, and elderly are things that need to be done. Lets not forget helping out the middle class, who pay most of the taxes that the Government uses to figth it’s wars and make themselves rich with. How about doing something about the loss off all the good jobs that have been taken away from the middle class through government sponsored corporate greed.
How about bringing jobs back to the USA instead of paying someone in India half as much to do?

Feingold Rules Out Run for President

AP
Excerpt:
MILWAUKEE (AP) — U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold has decided against seeking the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, saying he wanted to focus on his work in the Senate…
Feingold, 53, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel he realized he would be a long-shot candidate in a bid for the presidency.
An outspoken opponent of the Iraq war, the Patriot Act and other Bush administration policies, Feingold had formed his PAC, the Progressive Patriots Fund, and visited key presidential primary states such as Iowa and New Hampshire.

H.L.s Take
No one is going to be able to beat Hilary for the nomination. With Bush Sr. and Bill Clinton palling around you know that it’s going to come to 36 consecutive years with either a Bush, or a Clinton in the Whitehouse. Those 2 guys rule the world.

Pelosi backs Murtha for majority leader

AP
Excerpt:
WASHINGTON – Rep. Nancy Pelosi (news, bio, voting record), in line to become speaker of the House, stepped into a postelection power struggle among fellow Democrats on Sunday with a letter of support for Rep. Jack Murtha in the race to pick a majority leader.
“Your presence in the leadership of our party would add a knowledgeable and respected voice to our Democratic team,” Pelosi, D-Calif., wrote Murtha. The Pennsylvania lawmaker is widely viewed as an underdog in a two-man race with Maryland Rep. Steny Hoyer (news, bio, voting record) in this week’s leadership elections.
Murtha issued a statement saying, “I am deeply gratified to receive the support of Speaker Pelosi, a tireless advocate for change and a true leader for our party and our country.”
Hoyer has been second-ranking in the Democratic leadership behind Pelosi the past four years. He issued a statement saying he was confident he would win the race.

H.L.s Take
Murtha would be a great majority leader, he would keep the heat on the Democrats to do as much as possible about getting our troops out of Iraq ASAP

Holding to the Center, Losing My Seat by Lincoln Chaffee

NY Times
Excerpt:

LAST Tuesday, I was one of the many moderate Republican casualties of the anti-Bush virulence that swept the country. Despite my having voted against the Iraq war resolution, my reputation for independence, the editorial endorsement of virtually every newspaper in my state, and a job approval rating of 63 percent, I did not win. Why?

Back in December 2000, after one of the closest elections in our nation’s history, Vice President-elect Dick Cheney was the guest at a weekly lunch meeting of a small group of centrist Republicans. Senators Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine, Senator Jim Jeffords of Vermont, Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and I were honored to have the opportunity to visit with him on the eve of a session of Congress in which, because of Republican defeats, the Senate would be evenly divided at 50-50.

As we sat in Senator Specter’s cozy hideaway office and discussed the coming session, I was startled to hear the vice president dismiss suggestions of compromise and instead emphasize an aggressively partisan agenda that included significant tax cuts, the abandonment of international agreements and a muscular, unilateral foreign policy.

I was incredulous. Instead of a new atmosphere of cooperation and civility which, after all, had been the promise of the Bush-Cheney campaign, we seemed ready to return to the poisonous partisanship that marked the Republican-Congress — Clinton White House years.

Mehlman to step down from RNC post

AP
Excerpt:
WASHINGTON – Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman, whose party lost both chambers of Congress in the midterm elections, will step down from his post when his two-year term ends in January, GOP officials said Thursday…
Before that campaign, he served as White House political director under Rove. In 2000, he served as national field director for Bush’s first presidential campaign, charged with coordinating the efforts of GOP leaders in every state

H.L.s Take
One of the biggest hypocrites of the Republican party is leaving. This is the guy who refused to pull that racist ad against Harold Ford who was Black. Of course the ultimate hypocrisy for a Republican is to be gay, since they hate that so much. Mehlmen was gay, of course he never admitted it. Last night on Larry King live, Bill Maher outed Mehlmen on National TV…Of course King claimed he didn’t know. What a total load that guy is. Either he was lying outright, or just has no idea what the hell is going in Washington. You Tube had the video up, then today CNN made them pull the video. But guess what, we have it right here, thanks to The Huffington Post. Wanna see it? Here it is.

The Secret World of Robert Gates

Consortium News
Excerpt:
Robert Gates, George W. Bush’s choice to replace Donald Rumsfeld as Defense Secretary, is a trusted figure within the Bush Family’s inner circle, but there are lingering questions about whether Gates is a trustworthy public official….

For instance, the Russian government sent an intelligence report to a House investigative task force in early 1993 stating that Gates participated in secret contacts with Iranian officials in 1980 to delay release of 52 U.S. hostages then held in Iran, a move to benefit the presidential campaign of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

H.L.s Take:
This Gates guy is yet another Bush family crony, who will do whatever they tell him to. Nothing will change in Iraq with Gates in charge. The only way the new Congress will be able to do anything in Iraq is to refuse to stop paying for it, and don’t count on that.

The new movie “Fast Food Nation” opens soon. I got a chance to go over to The 4 Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills a couple of days ago for a gourmet lunch and to chat with some of the stars of the film, which recently premiered at The Cannes Film Festival.

The Movie is an adaptation of Eric Schlosser’s book expose Fast Food Nation.
In the book journalist Schlosser argues that the fast food industry is responsible for the explosion of malls in America’s landscape, expanding rich/poor gap, causing obesity and other rampant health conditions documented in electronic health records , and in the vanguard of U.S. American cultural imperialism abroad.
The film adaptation is a fictional story based on the book, in which Fast food executive Greg Kinnear finds there is something bad in the burgers, and he had to find out what and how it got there. He takes a trip to the massive slaughter houses of corporate giant “Mickeys” He also learns how they use cheap and illegal immigrant employees, working them to the bone for almost nothing to bring you your Burger and Fries. Here are some pics from the event.

Wilmer “Yo Momma” Valdarama and Catalina Sandino Moreno

Fast Food Nation opens next week Click Here for more info. and to attend a free screening.

Heres the latest from Pixwit

Startling Findings in Tillman Probe

ABC News
Excerpt:
Pat Tillman when he was with the Arizona Cardnials
Nov 9, 2006 (AP)— In a remote and dangerous corner of Afghanistan, under the protective roar of Apache attack helicopters and B-52 bombers, special agents and investigators did their work.
They walked the landscape with surviving witnesses. They found a rock stained with the blood of the victim. They re-enacted the killings here the U.S. Army Rangers swept through the canyon in their Humvee, blasting away; here the doomed man waved his arms, pleading for recognition as a friend, not an enemy.
“Cease fire, friendlies, I am Pat (expletive) Tillman, damn it!” the NFL star shouted, again and again…..

Spc. Steve Elliott, said he was “excited” by the sight of rifles, muzzle flashes and “shapes.” A third, Spc. Stephen Ashpole, said he saw two figures, and just aimed where everyone else was shooting.
Squad leader Sgt. Greg Baker had 20-20 eyesight, but claimed he had “tunnel vision.” Amid the chaos and pumping adrenaline, Baker said he hammered what he thought was the enemy but was actually the allied Afghan fighter next to Tillman who was trying to give the Americans cover: “I zoned in on him because I could see the AK-47. I focused only on him.”
All four failed to identify their targets before firing, a direct violation of the fire discipline techniques drilled into every soldier.
There’s more:…

One investigator told the Tillmans that it hadn’t been ruled out that Tillman was shot by an American sniper or deliberately murdered by his own men though he also gave no indication the evidence pointed that way.
“I will not assume his death was accidental or ‘fog of war,'” said his father, Pat Tillman Sr. “I want to know what happened, and they’ve clouded that so badly we may never know.”

H.L.s Take:
As I have said before this is a story that refused to die, It refuses because Pat Tillman’s parents refuse to accept the constant stonewalling and lying. The media is onto it because of the whole story of Pat, leaving the NFL to go fight. The Tillmans can make as much noise as they have to on this until the truth is revealed. Each investigation reveals more, and there are plenty of people who refuse to talk. This story is the embodiement of everything that went wrong for Bush and his wars.